


I wish I had a lifetime

by KissedByNightshade



Category: Bleach
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-17 22:47:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7289161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KissedByNightshade/pseuds/KissedByNightshade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter how many times you dream of devils and the apocalypse, you can’t let go of her sublimity as she descended from the hole in the sky, as though she had transcended humanity itself. You can’t let go of her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I wish I had a lifetime

 

She’s dancing in rays of sunlight, hair bouncing in the breeze and catching sparks from the sky. All gold, glowing like embers in the late afternoon, the scarf wrapped around her neck and the earmuffs clutching at the sides of her head doing nothing to restrain any part of her. Winter steam curls into the air, dusting the clouds with a pearly sheen as you walk. 

The song she hums isn’t one you recognize, though she’s hummed it before, at least a dozen times. You say nothing; you’re no longer sure how to ask.

Your gaze is unwavering as you watch, though, and after a moment or two her eyes dart sideways to find yours. You see questioning and meet it with walls, but you’ve known her too long to hide from her. She catches you in her irises and can offer only sympathy.

From Orihime’s other side, Chizuru chirps a question about the math homework, and both of you are caught off guard, until Orihime finally manages to pull together the answer. You make note; you weren’t listening during math class. You weren’t, in fact, listening during any of your classes, so it’s a good thing that Orihime promised to study with you tonight.

It isn’t until you get home after dark that you realize you didn’t listen to a word of Orihime’s explanations, either.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

It’s eerie, how easily everyone adjusted to life after.

When they replay broadcasts about the ‘coma’ that claimed all of Karakura Town, they make it sound like some sort of disease. As if everyone had come down with the flu at the same time. Whenever you see the news reports about it on television _(‘investigators have no new leads as to the cause of widespread lethargy in Karakura Town last month’)_  you leave the room, lip retracting from your teeth in a snarl that leaves your siblings baffled and worried.

But what do they know? They got to spend that day asleep, knocked out by whatever magic scientists there _were_ among Ichigo’s friends. They didn’t have to… have to...

Still, it’s not their fault, either. You only have a tenuous grasp on the entire situation, but between what Rukia volunteered before Ichigo woke up and what Ichigo and Orihime offered after, you know that everything is the shinigamis’ fault. Who else could the blame fall upon? They should have done their job. To protect everyone. To at least find a way to get Ichigo’s powers _back_  to him, so that he’d quit giving everyone that dead-eyed look. That defeated look.

They should have done their job better, so that dark angel (eyes, wings, jaws, heart) would never have had cause to take Orihime away.

So you go to school and you return home and you blame the shinigami, and you go in circles. Every day circles, until it nearly drives you mad.

(How easy it was for Keigo and Mizuiro and Chizuru to return to normalcy, decide that things are over. But you look into the haunted eyes of your other friends and you know that for them — for _you_  — it will _never_  be over.)

(You remember crouching in a cavern, watching three of your friends step into the void and take on the challenge of saving a princess. When they were done, she returned as something far more powerful and more sublime than royalty. It was you who had no strength left to offer.)

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

She shows her teeth in quiet ways, in ways that you’re sure the others don’t notice. In fact, you’re very certain, watching her scribble fiercely into the margins of her notebook, watching her happily feast upon bean paste and bread for lunch, watching her hum nameless tunes as she walks home next to you, always watching her, that no one at all knows just how much she’s come to resemble the dragon to which she once likened _you_.

And since you’re the only one who knows, it becomes a closely-guarded secret. You withdraw from Chizuru’s attentions and Keigo’s distractions and focus your whole being on Orihime, who is too innocent to really be a dragon but too divine to be a princess. You don’t understand; you can’t. You only know that Ichigo led her into a world where things you took for granted can’t be true. Things like _good always triumphs over evil_  and _strength of heart is what determines victory_. You hate that she fits into that world so perfectly.

You tell her as much one day, a muddy March day with mist and cherry blossoms lightly falling on your coats. Really, it comes out more like, “You sure are chummy with those shinigami."

Predictably, Orihime reddens, though that could be the influence of the cold. Her reply mingles with the sound of wind grappling with the pink petals that fill the air. “I thought Kuchiki-san was your friend too!"

“She is," you say, and it’s true, and you feel momentary regret because really, you didn’t think this through. “She is."

But it isn’t Rukia you were talking about, and it isn’t Rukia you think about when you watch her skip school to fight off a Hollow, or visit that weird _shop_ because a friend is in town, or even spend spring vacation in this ’Soul Society’ on invitation. It isn’t Rukia who is the problem. It isn’t even the pretty blonde woman — whose name, you learn, is Rangiku — who is the problem.

Shit, though. You can’t even blame Ichigo for this one. Despite the fact that he spends most of his waking hours on his sport-of-the-week, he looks so pathetic that blaming him would be like putting a dog out in the rain.

You spend the spring and the early weeks of summer blaming nameless shinigami for things that they couldn’t prevent. You whittle your days away dreaming of things that can’t be taken back.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Eyes. Wings. Jaws. Heart.

In your dreams they chase you. Or, perhaps you are merely _chased_ ; your legs pound the concrete and arms ache, and even though Keigo and Mizuiro and Chizuru and everyone else is with you, you sense how _alone_ you are. How helpless. How very _human_.

In your nightmares, they catch you.

You only saw him once, but the black sclera and the extra eye stick out the most, even more than the way he walks or the wings or that fearsome presence that crushes at you. Even the other man by his side — the one who’d turned on his master — held no bearing on that figure and those purple irises. You could drown in them. You nearly did.

Sometimes the dreams turn inside out, and you’re the beautiful woman who’d intervened. You are cut down even as you stand, unable to do a thing in your defense. In the background you can see your own face in the crowd, stunned. Shocked into stillness; you can’t even begrudge yourself anger for not intervening. You know that the human girl in her school clothes can do nothing here.

Or you stand helplessly, killed but not yet dead, watching as your town combusts, as your friends melt into nothingness. As you yourself are burned to ashes — but no, you’re still there. The world itself is ablaze, and now countries fall, continents. The heavens themselves descend into chaos, and you can do nothing. Nothing except watch. 

Most nights you wake once, twice even, gasping and covered in sweat. You’ve become quite skilled at hiding your despair, making sure your little sister doesn’t even stir as you slip out the window, climb the oak that grows in front of your second-floor window, and lay down on the roof. Your tank top and shorts stretch tight as you clutch at your knees.

This body of yours… you’ve built it strong. You’ve built it to be wiry muscle and quick elbows and sharp knees. This body of yours is meant to fight, to protect, to destroy. This body has won awards for its strength and skill.

This body is human. This body can be destroyed. It is weak, and fragile, and you aren’t strong enough to protect anyone anymore. 

Still, as the early summer breeze tugs at the hair follicles on your legs, you find the moon in your field of vision. Some nights it’s low in the sky and dimmed; others it turns a clear bluish-white and sparkles high in your field of vision. Either way, its glow wraps around you and you remember that this town, this place that was almost destroyed, isn’t a cage; it’s just a place. It can’t hurt you, and the people in it won’t hurt you, either.

The moon is your home, and its tender light reminds you of someone else as well.

No matter how many times you dream of devils and the apocalypse, you also can’t let go of the _ache_  at the corner of your vision, the heat of the air like the sunrise, the world changing from subdued grey of winter to the bright green of spring. You can’t let go of her sublimity as she descended from the hole in the sky, as though she had transcended humanity itself. You can’t let go of _her_.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

And you don’t want to.

The sleepovers you once held as children turn into long summer days and nights spent lounging around her apartment, periods of time in which you don’t see your family at all. You own two toothbrushes, and one of them sits next to Orihime’s bathroom sink. And during those days, you leave her tiny bathroom with your hair smelling like her hair, with her body wash still fresh on your skin.

You leave in the cooler evenings to walk to the market, walk home, wander around the neighborhood side by side. You pet her neighbors’ dogs and try to feed cats and squirrels by the riverbank. You chase dragonflies with her, just like you did five years ago and three years ago and one year ago.

When you retire in the evenings with grass stains on your clothes, there’s something removed about the way you fix dinner together, eating at Orihime’s kotatsu and curling up on the futon to watch cartoons. You absently stare at the colorful animations and think selfish thoughts as her head slumps against your shoulder and the way her arm presses against your chest. Every movement, every breath of hers leaves you hyperaware and resentful.

You think you must’ve always loved her, but on some occasions, you’re not so sure. Every time you even look at her, you notice something new, something that makes you fall in love all over again. (The flush of her cheeks when she tastes some new combination of flavors she likes; the lilt of her voice when she runs up the riverbank calling your name; the little wrinkles she leaves behind when she folds her shirts too hastily off the line she strings across her apartment–)

She doesn’t know, of course. She can’t — you’ve accepted that. Maybe you’d accepted that from the very beginning. That she’ll live in love and find someone who appreciates her for everything she is, who understands how perfectly _divine_  she’s become. That you’ll follow in her shadow, too mortal to ever know the world in which she immersed herself.

But maybe there’s also a part of you that _can’t_ accept that. 

You notice that the nightmares visit less frequently when you share her mattress, though you still wake almost once a night. Each time you stir in a gasping panic, it’s a swift rush to cover your tracks, to inhale, exhale, quietly slip the sheet off your sweat-dampened body until you’re cool enough to go back to sleep. The mere sight of Orihime, two feet away and curled around Enraku, is usually enough to slow your frantic heartbeat.

Once, though, just once, you wake from your usual troubled dreams to the slight shifting of the blankets. You lay still, perfectly still, as your eyes adjust to the darkness, and you realize that she is shaking, her body silently shivering under the mid-July moonlight. 

“Hey,” you whisper, softly enough so that you don’t scare her. Her shaking slows, but doesn’t stop, and you reach out to touch her shoulder. “Orihime."

Her voice, muffled by the blankets and the stuffed bear she clutches to her chest, comes back to you. “Go back to sleep, Tatsuki-chan, it’ll be okay…"

But she’s wrong. So you inch across the mattress and find her shoulder with a single burrowing hand, and she yields to you as you turn her onto her back. It’s then you realize that she’s been crying; you can’t distinguish the colors of her features in the waning moonlight, but you know Orihime. You know that those aren’t blanket creases on her cheeks, and her eyes aren’t puffy and narrowed from sleepiness.

“You too?” you mutter, too embarrassed to look her in the eye for long, and she nods, too embarrassed to meet your gaze.

You have to dig under the blankets to find her hand, but when you do, she squeezes both of yours. You press your fingers into the gaps between hers and curl in close for the rest of the night.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“Aren’t you gonna cut your hair?"

You’re eating on the school roof with her, as usual, and since your third-year lunch schedules don’t coincide with any of your other friends, it’s just the two of you. Well, some freshmen are cavorting a short distance away, but the pair of you established the secluded space next to the air duct, and some kids in their first year of high school aren’t about to question the dominion of third-years. (You may have given them the evil eye and flexed, but Orihime doesn’t need to know that. 

You run a hand through the finger-length locks, now long enough to be noticeable. You started growing it out in the back nearly a month ago; in the late August sunlight, the thought of chopping the whole thing short again exhausts you, and you’ve never been one to ignore your instinct. “Nah; I’m gonna let it get longer this time and see." 

You glance sideways at Orihime’s startled expression. You recall a very different haircut in a very different time; you relish the remembered feeling of bloodied knuckles after you’d kicked the shit out of those bullies. She hasn’t cut it since then — except for the front, and her bangs are long enough now to easily tuck behind her ears. “…are you sure? It’s just… it’s been such a long time, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it long…"

Has it ever been? You just remember asking the barber to cut it short, just like the boys in your karate class. You remember the look on your mother’s face as she tried to recover her wits after. “Eh, it was time for a change. Besides, I like feeling the breeze in it."

You miss seeing something change in her eyes; you’re leaning against the curb of the rooftop, gazing out across the street to the convenience store where everyone goes to get a snack after school. You miss seeing her expression become determined and her feet move across the rooftop. 

You don’t miss her hand on your shoulder, because that’s impossible to miss, because she’s so close to you all of a sudden. Feet planted on the rooftop like cherry trees, eyes bright with the sun, the only sign you have of her hesitation is how _slowly_  she leans in, how carefully her hand on your shoulder begs askance. You don’t move, only tilt your head slightly skyward in answer.

Kissing her is like slipping into warm water. Your eyes close, your nostrils flare, you stop breathing except to take her in. The breeze that tugs at your hair is a current, just like the slow, uncertain movements of her lips on yours, and you let both carry you. The hand on your shoulder crawls up to nest on the back of your neck.  You inhale the sticky-sweet scent of the bread she ate for lunch and keep clutching the edge of the rooftop. When she pulls away, her hand still resting on the nape of your neck, you open your eyes to see hers half-closed and soft, blinking slowly back open.

When Orihime catches your eye, she seems to realize very suddenly what she’s done. Eyes go wide with terror, and she backs away very quickly. “I’m sorry, I just…” she says, her hands flying away from you and darting to cover her mouth. “I’m sorry!” 

She doesn’t even take the time to grab her school bag as she flees the rooftop.

You stay there for a long time, ignoring the sticky heat of the afternoon as it drags on. You don’t even leave the rooftop when the bell rings, marking the passing period after lunch.

You _do_  leave once Ichigo shows up, accompanied by Keigo and Ishida Uryuu, who looks at both Ichigo and you with suspicion. Hoisting Orihime’s bag onto your shoulder, you stalk off the rooftop, ignoring the puzzled look and, “Aren’t you supposed to be in class, Arisawa?” you hear from one of the boys. You walk down two flights of stairs and slip out of the building and climb the first tree you come across.

You scale its branches and drape both the bags from its branches and you _wait_ , because right now you don’t want to see Orihime and you also don’t want to leave her side, and your clashing schedules don’t afford you either of those things. 

She appears two hours later, looking frazzled and carrying a stack of papers and a sparkly pink notebook that you recognize as Chizuru's, and you feel a pang of regret as you realize that she had to borrow it, that she went without her usual things because you were too much a _coward_ to face her–

"Tatsuki-chan," she says softly. You notice that she's blushing, or is that just a reflection of the sunlight? No, that's definitely a blush. No use trying to deny it.

It hits you all at once that  _she_ was the one to kiss  _you_.

"Orihime," you reply, letting your body sink over the branch until you're practically dangling, pushing yourself off the bark so that you don't tear your leggings or scrape your skin on the way down. You land, take the bags from the branch. Hand her bag to her.

It occurs to you that you're the only one who calls her that — just Orihime, just as you always have. It occurs to you that you're the only one who recognizes her, both as the princess and the dragon. Divine. Protective of that which she treasures most. 

You make a point of meeting her eyes.

"Tatsuki-chan, I'm... I wanted to apologize." She looks so sorry that you could cry, or perhaps take her into your arms and reassure her that she's fine, that you'd give her anything she wanted, that you've never wanted anything else. "I shouldn't have... _kissed_ you like that, I don't know what I was _thinking_..."

"Orihime," you say again, and your bag tumbles to the dirt. And before you can stop yourself, you lurch forward, your hands finding the shell underneath her jaw, and you kiss her.

This kiss is more like jumping into the ocean — air streaming from your nose, you clutch at her face like it’s an oxygen mask. It’s only a few seconds before she snakes her arms around your back, drawing you in by your uniform and by the strands of your still-short hair. 

Your back hits the tree; you’re panting into her mouth, trying not to think too much about the stairwell windows in the school building behind you, or who could be watching, or what it means that you’re kissing each other. Just breathing her in; just kissing her and being kissed. Kissing Orihime, who is princess and dragon, but who is also human, just a girl, just a human.

Just like you.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the bleachfemslashexchange as my gift to stacinadia! Their prompt was ‘princess and dragon, possibly with a twist’. I took inspiration from Japanese dragon mythology, and then Tatsuki took it from there. (Also, the title is a line from a song by Imagine Dragons… a song that’s a lot happier than this pieces ended up being whoops.) Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it!


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